Hahaha... I love this guy, the author of Light Alloy.So I'm browsing his all-Russian website using Google translator. The front page says that the program is free for Russian speaking customers and there's a link:

which takes you to the license page. Here, he gives the instructions on how to input the free license:

That's hilarious. I'm trying to figure out what "Then have a little break his head over a mystery" means! Maybe this is his way of truly filtering out russian speaking customers. He beat google at their own game. Brilliant![edit] I get it! It's a riddle. Cool. Anyone?

VLC Player was OK - I mainly used it for certain file types that didn't seem to want to play on anything else. Then with the versions right before 1.0 it got a lot better at just about everything on my PC. But Version 1.0 iddnt work very well at all for me and I was about to abandon it altogether. But the next two versions were about perfect IMO. UI is pretty bland, I agree, but it just seems to kick ass on files that I cannot get to play elsewhere. WMP11 is fine except for that doggone DRM. I had a number of downloaded tracks from Rhapsody that were perfectly legal; while the tracks were subscription-related I still had an active subscription to Rhapsody (heavily discounted on a deal with Comcast) and therefore the tracks should have been legal for me to play. But the latest version of Rhapsody Player at the time was real buggy and so I had not yet tried reinstalling it on a freshly reinstalled XP Pro. WMP11 would not play any of the tracks, saying that I must hafve Rhapsody Player installed before playing them. Other players played them anyway, so I gave up on WMP. I don't need that kind of policing.

VLC, since their 1.0 release, can now rip/burn DVD movies, believe it or not. My only big gripe is that if I'm watching a small video - wmv or avi - and don't want to open it up full screen, it keeps reverting back to the default size even though I set it to 2x. Every time a scene would change it would jump right back to small. So now I have to use the hotkey - Ctrl+4 - to make the size 2x and stay that way throughout the video. Plus, VLC has very decent frame-by-frame features, jump ahead or back short, medium, or long times. It just does a lot that other free viewers do not. At least that I have found.

- no, I don't have it, (I couldn't even find a way to purchase it from the Russian spoken pages), but I am eager to learn! The Russian SLO.RU states Light Alloy to be freeware, so the answer to the riddle may not be too difficult, for Russians... (unless the SLO version is a special SLO-Russian version).

No, the program doesn't phone home. If you enter the correct key, it will register (it's internally programmed). It's a riddle. I also found another forum yesterday (i'll post the link if I find it again); in the forum (which was also in russian), a bunch of russian people were trying to figure out what the answer to the riddle was. No one in the thread seemed to have found it. So, I'm not sure how the free registration actually works. I think the author is just having fun.

OK, I'm getting closer...If you leave the program (Light Alloy) in Russian, and then go into the license registration screen, you will see that there is something prewritten in the "Registration Name" field:

So that must be a prompt or something. Maybe it's a question, and the answer is the key, and if you put it in, the registration is complete.

OK, I've almost figured it out.The author has programmed a bunch of riddles into the program's registration dialog. So if you leave it in Russian mode, there will always be a different riddle in the "registration name" field. If you know the answer, put it in the bottom field and you will succeed with registration. I'm trying to figure it out using some online translators, but i can't seem to figure out any of the riddles. The closest I've come is the current one I'm trying:

For the curious, another developer that does the "free for Russian speaking users" thing is Westbyte. For the non-Russian speaking populace they have a download manager called Internet Download Accelerator which is shareware. However, if you speak Russian they have a download manager available called Download Master which is the exact same program, but has a hard-coded Russian interface. Download Master is freeware.

Societies that have a lot of taxes in general, also have a lot of rules and regulations for people to take their (fair) share out of the collected taxes. To keep all that administration and what not going...more taxes are required.

For video player, I'm not looking into the fastest and lightest, but features that can save you from worst nightmare. E.g. some video player allows you to adjust the playing speed and subtitle/sound synchronization.

MPC-HC will let you set a variable audio delay, Options->Audio Switcher->Audio time shift (ms). You can also advance/delay the subtitles in steps of 500ms, (F1/F2), won't affect hardcoded subs naturally.